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Thursday, April 18, 2019

Facebook Fast Facts

It is blocked in North Korea and China.
There were 35,587 employees at Facebook, as of December 31, 2018.
Facebook introduced words such as "friending" to the lexicon.
Timeline:
February 4, 2004 - Facebook is launched by Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
June 1, 2004 - The company moves to Palo Alto, California.
December 1, 2004 - One million users are active on the site.
September 1, 2005 - High school students are allowed to join Facebook.
September 20, 2005 - The company drops the "the" from the name and becomes Facebook.
December 1, 2005 - Six million users are active on the site.
April 1, 2006 - Facebook for Mobile launches.
September 5, 2006 - The News Feed is introduced.
September 26, 2006 - Facebook expands to allow anyone to register.
March 28, 2007 - Former Harvard classmates Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss sue Zuckerberg in federal court, alleging that he stole the idea for Facebook from them. The two sides later agree to a $65 million settlement.
March 2008 - Facebook hires Sheryl Sandberg to be the company's chief operating officer.
February 9, 2009 - Facebook introduces the "Like" button.
June 2009 - Facebook becomes the number one social network in the United States, surpassing MySpace, according to PC World magazine.
October 1, 2010 - The movie "The Social Network," a fictionalized account of the start of Facebook, is released.
September 22, 2011 - Facebook introduces the Timeline feature.
November 2011 - Facebook settles charges brought by the Federal Trade Commission that it engaged in deceptive practices concerning users' privacy.
October 4, 2012 - Facebook reaches one billion active monthly users.
June 2013 - Edward Snowden releases documents on the NSA's Prism program. Snowden claims that the NSA has monitored the users of Facebook and other internet companies. Zuckerberg denies Facebook cooperated with the NSA in a post.
February 19, 2014 - Facebook announces that it is purchasing mobile messaging service WhatsApp for $19 billion.
June 17, 2014 - A study by researchers at Cornell, the University of California San Francisco and Facebook is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. For one week in early 2012, according to the study, Facebook changed the content mix in the news feed of approximately 690,000 users and manipulated the content to gauge the user's emotional response. The study found that users who were shown negative content were slightly more likely to produce negative posts. Users in the positive group responded with more upbeat posts. Many users react with anger at what they say is a dangerous social experiment.
June 23, 2015 - Stock rises 3% to reach an all-time high. The company's market value is close to $245 billion, making it worth more than Walmart, a $235 billion company.
August 24, 2015 - Facebook hits a milestone when one billion users log in to the social network in a single day.
November 15, 2016 - Facebook and Google announce they will no longer allow fake news publishers to use their ad selling services. Facebook says material from fake news publications falls under the category of "illegal, misleading or deceptive" content. Zuckerberg, however, rejects the idea that fake news on Facebook influenced the recent US presidential election.
April 13, 2017 - Announces that it has cracked down on 30,000 fake accounts in France ahead of the country's presidential election. The accounts were targeted to prevent trolling, spam and hoaxes, a Facebook spokesman says.
August 3, 2017 - Rolls out a "Related Articles" feature that provides links to stories from fact checking sites such as Snopes and PolitiFact.
September 6, 2017 - The company reveals that it sold about $100,000 worth of ads during the 2016 US presidential election cycle from inauthentic accounts and pages "likely operated out of Russia."
September 15, 2017 - The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook has given Special Counsel Robert Mueller records related to Russia-linked ads that were posted on the social network during the US presidential campaign.
September 21, 2017 - Says it will share content and related information from more than 3,000 ads it sold to Russia-linked accounts with the US House and Senate intelligence committees.
October 2, 2017 - Facebook gives Congress copies of the 3,000 political ads linked to Russia. CNN reports that some of the ads depicted refugees as rapists and others promoted gun rights. A ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee says he hopes to release a sampling of the ads to the public.
November 21, 2017 - ProPublica reports that it was able to buy dozens of housing advertisements targeted to audiences that excluded "African Americans, mothers of high school kids, people interested in wheelchair ramps, Jews, expats from Argentina and Spanish speakers." The company had said that it removed discriminatory ad tools after ProPublica publised a report in September. A Facebook executive says that a technical glitch allowed ProPublica to purchase the ads.
January 19, 2018 - Zuckerberg announces that Facebook is surveying users to rate news organizations and assign them trust scores. The scores and other factors are going to determine how much content from each publication will appear in news feeds.
March 16, 2018 - Facebook announces that it is suspending a data firm called Strategic Communication Laboratories and its subsidiary Cambridge Analytica, which provided the Donald Trump presidential campaign with digital voter outreach services. In a statement, the social network's vice president and deputy general counsel says that Cambridge Analytica harvested user data through a third party app, violating the company's policies protecting people's information. The data was gathered by Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American psychology professor who built a Facebook app and got about 270,000 volunteers to take a personality quiz. The volunteers consented to share info from their profiles with Kogan for academic purposes. Kogan then turned over the data to Camridge Analytica. When Facebook learned of the violation in 2015, the company removed the app and asked Cambridge Analytica to certify that it had deleted the harvested data.
March 17, 2018 - A joint investigation by the New York Times and the Observer of London reports that Cambridge Analytica obtained data from 50 million American Facebook users via Kogan's app. Cambridge Analytica covered the expenses of creating the app and used the info to create targeted political advertising for Trump, according to the investigation.
March 20, 2018 - A group of Facebook investors file a federal lawsuit against the company for allegedly making "materially false and misleading statements" about its privacy policies.
March 21, 2018 - During an interview on CNN, Zuckerberg acknowledges that Facebook made mistakes and should have responded more robustly to secure user data. He also says that his company is prepping to combat potential meddling in the 2018 midterm elections. Earlier in the day, Zuckerberg posted a message on Facebook with a timeline of events that led to the Cambridge Analytica leak.
July 26, 2018 - Shares plunge 19% after executives warn that revenue growth would slow as the company focuses on user privacy. The sell-off vaporizes about $119 billion in market value - the biggest single-day loss for any public company in history.
July 31, 2018 - Facebook announces it has removed a network of suspected Russia-linked accounts and pages involved in organizing political events in the United States.
September 28, 2018 - Facebook announces that an attack on the social network has exposed information on nearly 50 million users. The FBI is called in to investigate to attack, according to Facebook. On the day the breach is announced, two users file a class action lawsuit against the company.
October 12, 2018 - The company announces that it is investigating a security breach that enabled hackers to access phone numbers and email addresses for 30 million users.
November 5, 2018 - Facebook releases a report documenting the company's failure to prevent the spread of misinformation in Myanmar, where the government has been accused of carrying out a brutal campaign of violence and oppression against the Rohingya, a religious minority of Muslims. Government propaganda was posted on Facebook. The propaganda linked the Rohingya to terrorists.
November 14, 2018 - The New York Times publishes an investigation into Facebook's aggressive crisis management tactics amid the controversy over Russia's alleged use of the platform to meddle in the 2016 election. The newspaper reports that the company hired an opposition research firm called Definers Public Affairs which engaged in campaigns against Facebook critics. Definers allegedly encouraged reporters to investigate possible ties between an anti-Facebook group and the liberal billionaire, George Soros. After the New York Times story is published, Facebook announces that it no longer associates with Definers.
November 15, 2018 - During a conference call with reporters, Zuckerberg says that he learned of the company's relationship with Definers via the New York Times article. The company posts a response to the article citing alleged inaccuracies.
November 27, 2018 - Lawmakers from nine countries hold a hearing on Facebook and disinformation in London. Richard Allan, the company's vice president of public policy for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, attends the session on Zuckerberg's behalf.
December 14, 2018 - Facebook announces that a bug allowed third-party app developers to access photos people may not have shared publicly. As many as 6.8 million users could be affected.
December 18, 2018 - The New York Times reports that Facebook offered more of its users' data to companies than it has admitted. Despite assurances from Zuckerberg that people "have complete control" over who sees their content, The Times said documents and interviews with 50 former Facebook employees indicate that the company gave other firms access to user data.
March 28 2019 - The Department of Housing and Urban Development announces it is charging Facebook with violating the Fair Housing Act. This follows a formal complaint filed in August 2018 where HUD claimed Facebook allows landlords and people selling homes to use its advertising platform to "engage in housing discrimination." The complaint said advertisers can dictate who sees housing-related ads based on demographics.

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from CNN.com - RSS Channel https://cnn.it/2N7t4DU

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